New 2007US
Commemorative Stamps

I am sharing with you an
excerpt from Susan Sontag's "Regarding the Pain of
Others":

All memory is individual, unreproducible  it dies
with each person. What is called collective memory is
not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is
important, and this is the story about how it
happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our
minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of
images, representative images, which encapsulate
common ideas of significance and trigger predictable
thoughts, feelings. Poster-ready photographs  the
mushroom cloud of an A-bomb test, Martin Luther King,
Jr., speaking at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington,
D.C., the astronaut walking on the moon  are the
visual equivalent of sound bites. They commemorate,
in no less blunt fashion than postage stamps,
Important Historical Moments; indeed, the triumphalist
ones (the picture of the A-bomb excepted) become
postage stamps. Fortunately, there is no one
signature picture of the Nazi death camps.